Two broadcasters are turning their election night broadcast into an excuse to provide a branded gathering place for passersby. NBC News will set up shop in Rockefeller Plaza, using electronic signs of their own to show results and lighting the skating rink red and blue, depending on how states vote. ABC News will broadcast from its Times Square studios and blast video and electronic ticker results to people nearby. It bought space from Reuters, Nasdaq and the Hard Rock Cafe to take over their electronic signs across the street for Election Day. It will also be airing on-the-street …

NBC is rearranging its prime-time schedule, creating a crime-centric Wednesday lineup and exiling the struggling "Lipstick Jungle" to Fridays. As part of the change, the stalwart "Law & Order" is returning sooner than expected--back in a familiar spot Wednesday at 10 p.m., beginning Nov. 5. On the same night, the drama "Life" will move to Wednesday at 9 p.m., behind "Knight Rider," at 8 p.m. "Lipstick" will move to Friday at 10 p.m. beginning Oct. 31. NBC executives say they hope the shifts will entice viewers with "wall-to-wall satisfying mysteries" on Wednesday night.

If you could only keep your TV, your phone or your online computer, what would it be? With the recession looming, agencies, media, telecoms and marketers are pondering the implications of how people would answer that question. By most accounts, the winner could be the computer and its broadband connection--which provides streaming video, paid content, telecommunications and Web publications. For instance, research by Mindshare and Ogilvy & Mather shows that online women choose their laptop computers over TV or mobile phones as their device of choice.

JetBlue Airways is becoming the third partner to join Airline TV, an aerial ad network from out-of-home company IdeaCast. The other airline partners are Continental Airlines and Frontier Airlines. The network will be Nielsen-rated by year's end. Since IdeaCast does this for other airlines, [the partnership] gives JetBlue broader access to advertisers than selling ads on their programming on its own, says Fiona Morrisson, JetBlue director. Industrywide, airlines are boosting ad-supported in-flight entertainment to create extra revenue so they don't have to charge for bags and other services.

Television is at heart about intimacy and economy. It is best at communicating small things, person to person--thriving not on spectacle but on conversation. TV is also well-positioned to survive hard times. People will watch it because it's almost free, and they will especially watch it when they're out of work. But it may need to go back to its roots. In a tough economy, executives, producers and creative people should treat TV like it is small, fuzzy and black-and-white again. French New Wave filmmakers found that a shoestring budget was no impediment to creating beauty or suspense. …

MPG is showing that it is not afraid to gamble. It is introducing a new consumer research tool, called Resonance, by using it to predict the presidential election. The tool says Obama will win with 57% of the popular vote in battleground states. McCain will get 43%. The surprisingly specific forecast is based on data processed through social-network modeling. Resonance tabulated the responses of 1,200 "likely" voters who were quizzed about candidate trust, leadership and consistency. The tool also examined views being expressed on blogs and the media strategies the candidates are likely to use during the rest …

?Will the struggling financial sector be the savior for the struggling newspaper sector? The New York Times Co. reported a dismal third-quarter yesterday with declining advertising revenue, slowing online ad growth, and a possible dividend cut. By late in the day S&P downgraded the company's debt to junk. But at the same time, traffic to NYTimes.com has soared because of the financial crisis, as readers seek updated news. And one of the best performing sectors in ad sales in the last few months has been, yes, the troubled financial-services sector. Banks and related companies sought to reassure their …